Chapter 48 - The Mother's Final Sacrament
The catamaran bucked violently as an eight-foot swell slammed into the hull, knocking the boat against the heavy timber pylons with a deafening screech of fiberglass and wood.
Evelyn lost her balance, her high-heeled boot slipping on the ice-covered teak deck. She stumbled backward, her hips catching the stern safety cable. For a terrifying second, her upper body tilted over the black, freezing abyss of Lake Superior, Maya held loosely in her right arm.
"NO!" David roared.
He threw his gun aside onto the deck, completely disarming himself, and dove forward across the slick teak planks.
He grabbed Evelyn’s left forearm just as her boots slipped entirely off the edge.
Her weight—and Maya’s weight—jerked violently against David’s injured shoulder. Pain exploded through his joint like liquid fire, tearing his sutures open, but he didn't let go. He locked both hands around Evelyn’s wrist, bracing his knees against the lower stern stanchion.
Below them, the black water churned like an open grave, freezing spray soaking their faces. One drop into that fifty-degree water, and hypothermia would stop an infant’s heart within three minutes.
Maya was crying hysterically, suspended halfway over the void, wrapped in the soaked blanket.
"Give me the baby!" David screamed, his veins bulging in his neck, spit flying from his lips. "Evelyn, look at me! Give me Maya, and I pull you up!"
Evelyn hung there, suspended over the dark water. The storm whipped her silver hair around her face like a nest of vipers. She looked up at David—not with terror, but with a sudden, horrifying clarity.
She looked at his hands gripping her wrist. She looked at the blood running down his arms.
"You really do have my fire, David," she whispered, her voice strangely calm, almost loving. "You came through the storm for what was yours. Perhaps... perhaps you are my true son after all."
"GIVE HER TO ME!" he yelled, his muscles tearing, his grip slipping millimeter by millimeter against the wet cashmere of her coat.
With a slow, agonizing effort, Evelyn raised her other arm. She lifted Maya toward him.
David hooked his right arm under the baby’s fleece bundle, pulling Maya against his chest, locking her securely beneath his chin.
He had her. Maya was warm. Maya was alive. Her tiny heart beat rapidly against his collarbone.
He reached back with his right hand to grab Evelyn’s coat to hoist her back over the railing. "Grab my hand! Evelyn, grab my hand!"
Evelyn Vance looked up at him. The madness had receded, replaced by a cold, aristocratic pride that refused to ever wear handcuffs, refused to ever sit in a courtroom, refused to ever let the world see her defeated.
She smiled a faint, tragic smile.
"A Thorne never rots in a cage, David."
With her free hand, she reached into her coat pocket, pulled out the silver fountain pen, and drove the steel nib straight into David’s wrist.
The blinding pain caused his fingers to spasm open.
Evelyn released her grip on his arm.
She slipped backward into the dark.
There was no scream. There was only the sudden, heavy splash as her white fur coat hit the churning black swells of Lake Superior.
The dark water closed over her head instantly. The undertow of the twin diesel propellers caught her body, dragging her under the churning froth into the freezing, lightless depths of the lake.
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David collapsed onto the deck, gasping for air, clutching Maya to his chest with both arms, wrapping his entire body around the trembling child as the freezing rain poured down upon them.
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